Post by Zeeshan Hayat

In 2018 I joined Smashcloud, a software agency building products for clients in the UK and US. Fresh out of university, non-technical degree, working as a BA running discovery, writing specs, and managing delivery on complex software projects. I remember every time a bug used to come up I'd pull a chair next to the developer and watch them work. Lines of code filling the screen. I had no idea what I was looking at. I would always ask developers to explain how the query worked or where we were fetching this data from or how often a sync would run. A large part of my job depended on work I couldn't read or verify myself and I hated that feeling. I remember having a watercooler conversation with the CEO, who was also my first real mentor. I said I was thinking about a CS masters just to close the gap and understand the side of my work that I currently have no idea about. He told me to forget the masters. Said he'd been paying close attention to where the research and development was heading at the time and the problem I was describing, non-technical people being locked out of software, was one the industry was actively trying to solve. Not by making code easier to learn but by making it unnecessary to learn in the first place. He was confident it was a matter of when, not if. At the time I thought this tooling was decades away and when it would come, it would be beyond the reach of the common man. Recently I shipped a full marketplace platform. Real auth, real database, payments, matching logic. I built it alone, in weeks, using tools that didn't exist when I was sitting in that chair watching someone else's code window. His prediction was off by some years but otherwise completely accurate! If you would like to know more about PartnerIn feel free to shoot me a DM. #AI #BuildingInPublic #Founders #SoftwareDevelopment #NoCode